Photo: Matt Smith

Abortion is a hot button issue in the United States and nearly everyone has an unwavering opinion – there is no argument that can be made here that will instantly change your belief. Instead I will share with you some eye opening statistics regarding abortion and let you draw your own conclusions.

I am not one to wholeheartedly believe in statistics as a statistic can be dug up (or created) to support any viewpoint. My main issue with taking statistics at face value is that there can be numerous errors in the study which are reflected in the final data. Is it truly a random sample? Is it a big enough sample to draw any conclusions? Was the study funded by an organization that had an interest in the results coming out a certain way? Fortunately, abortion is not a difficult activity to track as nearly all abortions take place in a hospital or abortion clinic. The healthcare industry accurately tracks everything – in a 2008 sample of 100 hospitals there were 4 injuries relating to slicing zucchini, including one for trying to slice it with a mandolin …

In the case of abortion the margin of error is largely irrelevant — are you even able to come up with a ballpark answer? How common are abortions? 5% of all pregnancies? 10%? 20%? 40%? Higher?

In the United States 20% of all pregnancies result in an abortion. What’s interesting is that this number varies greatly across the country and the world. The District of Columbia and New York are close to 40% while many rural states are under 10%.

The variation within the United States is large, but it is huge when you compare countries with completely different cultures. Russia and Greenland lead the world with half of all pregnancies ending with abortion. At the bottom of the list are Hispanic nations such as Mexico, Panama, Chile and Portugal with less than 1%. Is it mainly religious beliefs, economics, or culture than creates such large differentials?

Who are the women having all these abortions in the US? Two facts combine to skew the statistics towards older women: the abortion rate peaked around 1990 and they have been alive longer to have more sex. An estimated 40% of all United States women in their 40s have had at least one abortion! If you take all women who are of childbearing age or have been in the last couple decades (ages 15 to 64), almost 30% of them have had an abortion. This is shocking when you consider a non-trivial chunk of those women are virgins (mainly the teenagers). Without diving into the numbers too far, we can conclude that over a third of sexually active women (15 to 64) in the United States have had an abortion!

There are 6.7 billion people living on this planet, but what if none of these abortions took place? There have been approximately 1 billion abortions over the past 100 years with U.S.S.R / Russia accounting for one third, China accounting for one third, and the rest of the world making up the last third! If those pregnancies were not aborted the world population would be closer to 8 billion (some of the aborted babies would have gone on to have children of their own). We currently don’t have a solution for overcrowding, food shortages, and pollution, but can you imagine if it was 20% worse right now?

These statistics are certainly eye opening whether you view abortion as an issue or a solution to an issue.

In your comments please be cognizant of the fact that many people hold strong beliefs on this topic. This is not a forum for debate.

Main source for statistics:
–http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/index.html